Rainbow Six Siege – In Depth: Planning Phase

Hey everybody, Iceycat here. I’m going do something a little different today. Usually I talk about what we know or what’s just been revealed and kind of dive into the facts on it. This video though is all about the planning phase in Siege and as far as we know, there isn’t any. This is a feature that a lot of veterans of the series would love to see return to the game. Is there a way to make this kind of concept work while NOT getting in the way of what the developers have done so far regarding the game’s infrastructure? Let’s go In Depth with what planning COULD look like in Rainbow Six Siege. Older Rainbow games had some pretty dedicated planning phases, as you can see here. You could plan routes for multiplayer AI teams and give commands at certain spots to tell the AI bots to do very specific things. In multi-player you could free draw on the map with the mouse and drop icons which was more friendly to using planning phases in a multi-player kind of environment. At the press of a button the player could pull up the planning map for reference if needed while playing.

Here’s what a planning phase looked like at E3 2014. This was obviously just a glorified blueprint that let you scroll through the different elevations of the map. There didn’t appear to be any way to actually draw on the map though and it looks like those yellow arrows were just animations made for effect rather than any actual live planning. And here’s what we have now. Everything is so small at that scale as to be fairly useless for planning. The focus of THIS design seems to be to show all the possible spawn points at once and that’s about it.

You can talk at this point but it doesn’t appear that drawing on the map or otherwise interacting with it are possible. Fans of the original games are frustrated at the loss of this feature. For campaign there’s not much point because there’s no longer any AI team mates to give planning codes to. Everything is either lone wolf, or live human PvP or PvE. The pacing in this game is slower than say “Call of Duty” or “Halo” but it’s also faster than older Rainbow games. That’s also why matches have timers on them, to prevent camping stalemates and drawn out slow matches that force dead players to suffer through spectating them. The developers want to keep the flow as smooth as possible but is there a way to make planning work while still maintaining the goals of the the developers for not drawing out match times? You’d still have to work within a limited time frame so the match wouldn’t take forever to start, at least in PvP so you don’t keep the other team waiting too long.

In PvE, it really wouldn’t matter but that’s not going to give enough time to interact with planning map in a meaningful way, will it? That’s when I started thinking about the multi-player variation of the planning map from Raven Shield. The allowed free drawing and icon placement is a quicker way to plan with live people. I don’t think free drawing would really work for two reasons. The limited time placed on pre match planning is the biggest, but also for console players, it’s really difficult to draw in a consistent manner using a controller. But the icons were a pretty easy way to do things. They would be fast enough for the pre match time limit, and would allow people using controllers to still interact with the planning map. Here’s an example I put together of how this would play out……

[chat over headset] “All right, [CHAT} looks like the hostage is in the kid’s room. Let’s see what we want to do… [CHAT] If we come through…. Let’s….Maybe it’s better to go ahead and go over the roof [CHAT] instead, if, we….no, no… okay, here’s what we’re going to do… [CHAT] Let’s split up, let’s take Cody, Eric and me [CHAT] we’ll go through the living room and up the front hallway stairs, [CHAT] Um, let’s head to the master bedroom. I think you’re going to find that [CHAT] the door there is blocked. So go ahead and breach through that if you have to. [CHAT} and set up on this wall…here…and hold position. until we’re ready.

[CHAT] Uh….Dad, and Brian….Why don’t you guys [CHAT] go along the wall here by the garden. [CHAT] Stick tight to the wall so they don’t see you from the windows on the approach. [CHAT] Um…go up on top of the roof…and then drop down [CHAT] on these windows here. We’ll coordinate the breach and [CHAT] and pinch them in the middle.” [CHAT OVER] So here’s how this works: this goes back to the style of planning that was present in Siege’s E3 2014 demo. The blueprint is larger and allows you to quickly toggle between the different floors. There are only three icons to choose from. The Position Icon shows a neutral position marker and can be used to designate a starting point or an objective point.

The Location Icon functions sort of like an “X marks the spot” kind of marker and is a general purpose icon as well. Action Icons show a breach position but can also be used for other things like tossing a grenade or some other type of dynamic action. Why 3 icons? Well this limits it to the buttons on an Xbox or PlayStation controller. Action Icons will be placed the A button, Location Icons will be placed with the X button, Position Icons will be placed with the Y button. The B button would be used to remove an icon after it’s been placed. A sort of undo or erase function. Wherever your on-screen cursor is when you press the corresponding button, the icon will appear there instantly.

Up in the corner of the map is a reference legend to help players remember which button does what. They’re laid out in the configuration of an Xbox or PlayStation controller. On PC you could just use numbers 1-4 or something like that and on PC maybe they’d be laid out in a row instead of a cross. A possible addition to this might be the ability to toggle colors. Perhaps up and down on the D-pad change which floor of the blueprint you’re looking at and left and right can toggle between a few colors if you need to change them up for any reason. Regardless, using a set up like this would allow for fast, on-the-fly planning. Even if you’re only given a minute to do it. it’s better than it is right now which is no planning at all. Plus this would allow the developers to keep the same fast flow between matches while filling a tactical need in making veterans and hardcore players happy. This would be very useful for dedicated teams, groups and clans. Which Rainbow has been known to have more than a few of over the course of the franchise. For people that aren’t into it, they’re free to simply not use it and for them the experience would stay just as it is now.

So what do you think? Would a setup like this for multiplayer planning be a welcome addition to the pre-launch phase? Or do you think it’s unnecessary and they should just keep it as it is? Leave a comment below or head on over to the forums or subreddit and join the discussion there. The links for both are in the comment section right below the video if you enjoy the Rainbow Six Siege: In Depth series please subscribe to show your support and keep more new videos coming. Thanks for watching, we’ll catch you next time!.